On Tuesday's broadcast of Fox News Channel's “Your World,” former Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said during the Biden administration, “One of the things that I struggled with when I was the secretary was that I didn't want to talk to policymakers or the White House. The goal was to gain involvement from the public.” . You wouldn't see that with Tom Homan. He said Homan's appointment is “a huge step forward, not only for the crisis we've been dealing with for the last couple of years, but also for border security and national security.”
“One of the takeaways from this is that electing Tom Homan as border czar means this administration is going to take the border issue very seriously,” Ortiz said. spoke.[ly]as their top priority. One of the things I struggled with when I was Secretary was getting engagement from policymakers and the White House. You wouldn't see that with Tom Homan. He will roll up his sleeves. He's going to go down to the border. He will talk to Border Patrol, ICE, and Customs agents to find out exactly what they need to do their jobs. So I see this as a huge step forward, not only for the crisis that we've been dealing with over the last two to three years, but also for border security and national security. ”
He added, “I think the president will work closely with the State Department to begin operating deportation flights to countries that have not been able to deport people for a long time.” I think this selection, or the selection of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as secretary of state, will help open up some lines. One of the things that Border Patrol and ICE have always struggled with is processing them but not having a mechanism to return them to their home countries. We need to be able to put people on planes and repatriate people who don't deserve immigration benefits here. ”
Ortiz added, “One of the things we often see in workplace enforcement is that there is a complete disregard for rules and procedures. That's why we have migrants coming into this country and migrants fleeing from Border Patrol. I think you're going to see a lot of companies and organizations starting to follow the rule of law, whether it's factories or large agricultural areas. That needs to happen. We have policies in place. We just need to force it, and I see Tom Homan as the type of person who will definitely make that happen.”
He concluded:[O]What I always say is you have to have the right amount of agents combined with the right amount of technology to put that infrastructure in place. There are thousands of pounds of steel on the border right now, just rusting away. Because for the last three or four years, we haven't been able to do anything with all that steel. Now, under this new administration, I think we can go back and complete some of the projects that we started that are still very important. ”
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